


didn't so much fall

by proxybird



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Celestial war, Footnotes, Office Jobs, falling
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:41:26
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23722522
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/proxybird/pseuds/proxybird
Summary: No, Crawly wasn’t much use with a sword. That part where he'd deliberately exaggerated his faulty grip and let the sword fly when demonstrating a swing had probably tipped the scales to "inept idiot, danger to himself and his surroundings".So here he was, in his tiny office on one of the lowest floors of heaven. Crawly was one more cog in the heavenly bureaucracy and he liked it that way, thank you.or: Crawly explores his empty office while everyone is off fighting in the celestial war and finds more than he bargained for.
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9





	didn't so much fall

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this months ago when the GO craze was at its height but never got around to posting it. It was inspired by a tumblr post making the rounds about Crawly taking a wrong turn in the heavenly offices and ending up in Hell. 
> 
> Thanks to tumblr's horrible search system I can't find it anymore, so if you happen to be the OP, please accept this meagre note as due credit.

While the Heavenly war raged in the sky, Crawly was stuck at his desk inside. Not that he wanted to be outside right now. Several new light effects involving flaming swords and burning wings were in process of being invented. Their occasional flashes lit up Crawly's tiny third floor window from above and he winced at every one of them. 

His superiors didn't think him much use with a sword. Crawly agreed wholeheartedly with that assessment. The switch from undefined celestial energy to manifestation within a limited form with bits poking out of it for fine manipulation hadn't exactly agreed with him. (The whole change from unbridled freedom to all these _boundaries_ hadn't sat right with him. Why should he, a being of light, narrow his essence so he could sit at a desk and handle bits of paper knowing all of this was really one big optical illusion, but he wasn't allowed to walk through the walls anyway?)

The memo drafting him upstairs had surprised him. Standing in the long line of angelic jocks itching to prove their zeal for the cause (not to mentions show off their prowess with a flaming sword) had made him queasy. 

No, Crawly wasn’t much use with a sword. That part where he'd deliberately exaggerated his faulty grip and let the sword fly when demonstrating a swing had probably tipped the scales to "inept idiot, danger to himself _and_ his surroundings". 

So here he was, in his tiny office on one of the lowest floors of heaven, behind his cramped grey desk piled with galaxy construction forms and nebula-quota ledgers to be dutifully checked and stamped ( _all atoms accounted for_ ). Crawly was one more cog in the heavenly bureaucracy and he liked it that way, thank you. 

Had everyone left the building to fight?

A few more celestial dust particles joined their brethren on the paper in front of him. Outside, a red flash streaked by. Crawly shivered. The nebulas could go check themselves for a bit (no one was working on galaxies at the moment anyway, and no one was going to for quite a while longer.*)

* The universe eternally expands not because of some cosmic ineffability ensuring the constant destruction and rebirth of reality, but because one day the person responsible had put the 'work in progress' sign in position, gone off to pick up their flaming sword, and never came back to put the edges on the universe. Presumably because their wings had burned off.

Crawly left his desk and wandered the hallways aimlessly. He waved at Trudy, the post office secretary, who was staring blankly at one of the silent memo tubes. He poked his head into the main office garden, which was deserted (both of people and plants, as this dull area of workspaces for project groups had as much to do with flora as managerial euphemisms had with good leadership). The tiny kitchenette was quiet as the grave.

A shiver ran up Crawly’s spine. Although he didn’t make much of an impression on anyone, he himself knew everyone on this floor, from Trudy and Diana the lunch cart lady, to Jeff the additional deputy junior assistant nebula construction supervision section coordinator.**

** Heaven has a convoluted bureaucracy that goes down well past "angel" and descends until it almost touches "human".

They weren't his friends, but Crawly's heart ached a little at the idea that they were now fighting outside what he had seen erupt as a silly water cooler disagreement. Worse, he suspected he had been on the wrong side of the discussion but that no-one had dragged him outside for a strong correction of his views*** purely because of his general unremarkability.

***The type of correction that ends with your head cut off by a flaming sword. 

Lucifer hadn't _sounded_ wrong. But Lucifer had also been _so_ high up that Crawly had metaphorically stared at the soles of his feet. You couldn't take any of his grand speeches about creating a new order where angels had a say in Creation too seriously. What trickled down to the battlefield of the coffee corner had been mere speculation - the grumbling of working masses who grumbled about abstract revolutions as a means to relieve the tension of their much more acute calculus-and-coworkers induced irritations, the ones they couldn't talk about without furtive glances and much hush hush noise.

No, really, Crawly could side with Lucifer (or, more accurately, Lucifer sympathisers); he agreed with Lucifer on the idea of questioning authority and receiving explanations. He just didn't think it sensible to bash other people's heads in over an ideological conflict. Unfortunately, Crawly had mistaken his personal convictions for those of the crowd. 

Now, he wasn’t totally alone in the building. Not quite. Not yet.

The barren department floor held no more secrets -- all its unsatisfactory filter coffee and bland biscuits achingly familiar. Crawly’s wandering feet took him to the hall with the elevators, the single sad potted plant, and the door to the fire escape stairwell.

 _Huh_ . _Didn’t think we were at risk of fire, here. Perhaps it’s all those swords they’re waving around?_

His feet stopped, then did a complicated little hop-and-shuffle. Was it any use taking the elevator up to the city? 

“Only if I want my head blown off,” Crawly muttered.

There were other offices, though, higher up, with bigger windows. Perhaps he could get a better view of the proceedings outside.

Crawly swallowed the rising bile.

He stepped forward aimlessly, furtively, sidled up closer to the fire door, not looking at it, not looking at anything really. His hand was on the handle, pushing it open before his paralysed brain quite caught up with the events. He shot a last glance at the glass door behind him, the grey hall stretching beyond it, the little canteen just off the right. The coffee pot. He couldn’t see into the post room but instinctively knew that Trudy would still be sitting there, vacant stare trained on a private vision of destruction. 

The fire door slammed closed behind him with the finality only a weighted, steel-plated door generates.

Crawly sat on the steps for a bit and let the silence of the thick concrete walls wash over him. The air in the stairwell was cool and smelled of concrete and trapped moisture. Whatever happened, happened elsewhere. In the utter silence of the stairwell there was only him.

Dust motes floated by in the dim light.

Crawly didn’t turn back; he suspected the fire door wouldn’t open again and he wasn’t inclined to test that theory in case it was true.

Growing bored, Crawly dusted off his pants and sauntered down a few flights. On a landing a few floors down, he peered through the window of another fire door at another grey hall. His hand was on the handle, but he thought better of it. 

Round and round he went, one hand on the banister, down and further down from landing to landing. Occasionally he hung from the railing like a dancer. A spring returned to his step; he was giddy now, more at ease than he had been in ages. 

_I will see what’s downstairs and return without anyone having missed me for so much as a second._

He bounced off of the last step of a staircase and swung around the landing. 

_When I return, this silly war has cooled down and we can all go back to crafting star systems and inventing moulds like normal celestial beings._

More steps ever descending. Crawly hummed tunelessly under his breath and swung around again. 

And stopped. 

There was no next staircase; up ahead, across the flat expanse of concrete floor, was a single, red, windowless door. 

Crawly glanced up at the light filtering down through layers of concrete-and-dust air. His skin pricked. Goosebumps erupted over his arms; he bit his lip. An unbearable tension lodged itself between his shoulder blades. The distance between him and the door stretched to infinity.

He reached out for the doorknob and found it warm.

With ineffable certainty, Crawly knew there was no going back anymore.


End file.
